Thank you to all of the participants in Google Code-In, a contest designed to introduce pre-university students from around the world to the many possibilities for participation in the open source community.

The contest was a great success with 361 students (ages 13-18) from 48 countries completing a total of 2,167 tasks during the 7 week contest period. The students completed 769 Easy tasks, 798 Medium level tasks and 600 Difficult tasks during Google Code-In. We are thrilled with the response and the quality of work completed for the contest and look forward to seeing more from these talented students in the future.

The top 10 countries with the highest number of participants were, in order: The United States, Romania, Bulgaria, The Russian Federation, India, Poland, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Australia.

We would also like to extend a huge thank you to our 20 mentoring organizations and administrators from all over the globe, who through their guidance and encouragement are introducing young coders to the numerous ways to contribute to diverse open source projects.

Please stay tuned as we announce the Google Code-In contest winners on Monday, February 14th.

Bulgarian cybercrime blogger Dancho Danchev mysteriously vanished a few weeks ago, worrying his colleagues and the Internet. He’s back! But what happened to him? According to one report, he was confined to a psychiatric hospital.

“Catching up in progress… inbox looks pretty messy” Danchev tweeted today—his first tweet since October. So, that’s a relief. Now, on to the rampant speculation: What has Danchev been up to?

Clues initially pointed to some sort of weird government trouble. Danchev’s colleagues at ZDNet published a cryptic email he’d sent to a friend. Included was a picture of what Danchev believed was a surveillance device in his bathroom, placed there by Bulgarian law enforcement who have been “building a case, trying to damage my reputation.” It looked really scary!

But, there’s probably more (or less) to the story than Danchev being disappeared by Bulgarian cops. According to the Bulgarian news site Dnevik.org, Danchev had been hospitalized in a Bulgarian psychiatric hospital since December 11th of last year. “He is now stabilized and will soon be discharged,” Dnevik wrote on Wednesday.

And, now, Danchev’s back. We’ll take this as a cautionary tale for all bloggers: Once you start seeing surveillance devices in everyday household items, it might be time to take a break and go outside.